Discomposed
What do we call
those limpid flowzy flowers
that look like someone took notebook paper
worn soft from pen-pressure—writing and crossing out,
writing and crossing out—weeks of heartneed drafting—
then, seeing their words also had changed, in the way weather does
staying weather, continuously
forward, away from itself,
in an electric-storm frenzy shredded it, abandoned it
scattered
around the bare
unrealized trunk
of whatever idea had birthed it
like drought-shocked, not autumn-full, leaves
before, like words come back to a voice after crying, returning
to gather the scraps in a pile, and with their last ink
dyeing them a gentle wash of pale blue
and gluing them—absentmindedly now—not inattentive,
absentminded the other way, absentminded past habit, absentminded
near to the point that someone watching, if anyone were, couldn’t say
for sure it was a person there doing it and not their body hove free
of the held breath one’s name is—absentminded past the point
where concentration could matter any more
than the pull and swell of tide could to a bird's altitude—
into a moment vacant and wide as an insomniac’s dawn,
the closest thing
this world has seen
to a halo?
